Saying it might have preempted the recent quadruple murders in Northridge, the Board of Supervisors demanded changes Tuesday to Gov. Jerry Brown's public safety realignment law so violent criminals released from state prison are monitored by armed parole officers, instead of merely being placed on probation.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky noted the realignment law, AB 109, currently mandates that inmates released since Oct. 1, 2011, can be placed on probation if their last offense was nonviolent, nonserious and nonsexual (N3).

Realignment does not consider at an inmate's entire criminal record - only their last offense.

Realignment is Brown's way of fulfilling a Supreme Court order to ease the overcrowding in state prisons by releasing 30,000 inmates by June 2013.

Aside from making the county Probation Department responsible for supervising former inmates whose last crime was an N3, it also forced the Sheriff's Department to jail those sentenced with N3 crimes since Oct. 1, 2011.

But Yaroslavsky argued violent criminals should continue to be supervised by parole agents with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, who subject them to more stringent monitoring and impose stricter penalties for failing to fulfill such requirements as attending drug rehab.

He said probation officers, the vast majority of whom are not armed and perform as much social work as law enforcement, should not be supervising violent criminals.

"That loophole - or that intentional gap in the legislation - has to be corrected," he added. "If it has an impact on the population in the state prisons, so be it, but there might be four people alive today in Northridge, California, if (the state) had taken the wise counsel of most of us here two years ago on that portion of the bill."

Supervisor Don Knabe, meanwhile, criticized realignment for putting a massive burden on the county without sufficient funding.

"We received something like $325 million in reimbursements, when our costs are closer to $575 million," he said.

The board directed its staff to report Jan. 15 on the wording of proposed changes to AB 109.

Luis Patino, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, contended "realignment is not to blame" for the killings in Northridge.

"The bottom line is that there was an admitted human error made in adjudicating the suspect at the county level," he said, referring to the District Attorney's Office statement this week that a prosecutor mistakenly allowed the Northridge shooting suspect to stay free, instead of sending him back to jail.

"It's time to stop perpetuating myths," Patino said. "There should not be a difference in quality between state parole and county probation - inmates continue to be supervised in their communities."

But county Chief Probation Officer Jerry Powers said the reason his department's supervision of N3 probationers has not been optimal is that the state rushed realignment through.

"I think part of the struggle was the need to go from zero to full speed in what is essentially the blink of an eye in county government time," he said, noting realignment forced a department with 6,000 staffers to supervise about 12,000 N3s on top of the 70,000 adult and juvenile offenders they have always been responsible for.

In the Northridge case, Ka Pasasouk, an N3 probationer with a long rap sheet, is being held on suspicion of shooting four people to death in an apparently illegal boarding house Dec. 2.

Pasasouk reported to the Probation Department shortly after being released from state prison in January, and then absconded within a month. His whereabouts were unknown for almost a year.

Powers said some individuals are going to commit crimes no matter what, and law enforcement agencies have limited ability to stop them.

"There are some who will end up in newsworthy events - it doesn't matter what we do to them, how we attempt to compel them, we are not going to change their behavior.

"Those are the ones that, unfortunately, we have to try to find a way to remove from the community for long periods of time," he added.

Supervisors Michael Antonovich and Mark Ridley-Thomas raised concern over the recidivism rate among N3 probationers, citing statistics from an advisory committee that coordinates the work of the various county agencies implementing realignment.

Antonovich noted of the 12,701 N3s placed under probation, 7,096 have been rearrested for either committing new crimes or violating the terms of their parole

Meanwhile, 799 N3s probationers were turned over to federal agents for deportation.

Ridley-Thomas said 26 percent of N3s have been rearrested for a new crime within six months.